Frederick Schwatka

IN THE RINK RAPIDS.

One evening about eight o'clock, while encamped below the cascades, we could hear dull, heavy concussions occurring at intervals of two or three minutes. The sound did not at all resemble that of distant thunder, and moreover, the sky was cloudless. Earthquakes were suggested, but the theory did not seem plausible, and we were compelled to attribute it to the cascades, which, I believe, have been known to cause earth tremblings and analogous phenomena.

I noticed that a Tahk-heesh Indian in arranging his head and breast bands for a load to be carried on his back, adjusted them as follows: The breast-band was grasped in the center by the palm of the hand, and when pulled out taut if the elbow of the packer just touched the load,—box, bag or bundle,—it was considered to be in proper condition to carry. The breast band adjusted, the head band is also pulled out, and between the two there must be the width of the packer's hand; the headband, which is not always used, being the longer. I had hitherto noticed this manner of arranging the load when among my Chilkat packers; the most singular feature of it being that the breast band passes over the arms so as to pinion them to the sides, making them apparently useless when the most needed.

CLAY BLUFFS ON THE UPPER YUKON.

On the 5th of July we again got under way on our raft. For the first few miles, eight or ten, the river is very swift and occasionally breaks into light rapids, although I believe a powerful light-draft river steamer, such as are used on the shallow western rivers, could easily surmount all the bad places we saw below the cascades of the great rapids. If I am right in my conjectures upon this point, the Yukon River is navigable for 1866 miles from the Aphoon or northernmost mouth of its delta.

Shortly after noon we passed the mouth of the Tahk-heen'-a or Tahk River coming in from the west, which is about two-thirds the size of the Yukon. By following it to its head, where the Indians say is a large lake, the traveler arrives at the Chilkat portage, the relation of which with the Chilkoot trail has already been noticed. From this point on my Chilkat guide, Indianne, was much more familiar with the country, having been over the Chilkat trail many times, and over the Chilkoot portage but once when a small boy. From the cascades to the Tahk River, a distance of nearly twenty-five miles, the banks of the Yukon are quite high and often broken into perpendicular bluffs of white clay, whose rolling crescent-shaped crowns were densely covered with pine and spruce. While the Tahk-heen'-a is the smaller stream, its bed and valley apparently determine the general characteristics of the river beyond its confluence, the high bold bluffs of clay just mentioned being from this point succeeded by lower shores wooded to the water's edge.

The Tahk-heen'-a, like all streams not interspersed with lakes on its upper course, carries quite muddy water, and we all felt a little uneasy about our fine grayling fisheries, a foreboding well founded, for they diminished with an exasperating suddenness, our evenings seldom being rewarded with more than two or three.

The last of the chain of lakes was reached the same day at 5 P.M., and we were prevented from taking advantage of a good wind by a three hours' detention on a sand-bar that stretched almost entirely across the river's mouth. This bar had a deep channel on either side of it, and when our most strenuous efforts completely failed to get the raft off, there was nothing to be done but to put the load ashore, and as wading was impossible, the cottonwood canoe was brought into action, slow as the method was. Not having been used much lately its condition was unknown, and as soon as we launched it, the water came pouring in from a dozen cracks where the gum had scaled off. One very vicious looking hole was suddenly developed in the bow as the first load went ashore, and "Billy" undertook to overcome this difficulty by putting most of the load in the stern, taking his own place there so as to allow the bow to stand well out of the water. With every load the leak grew worse, and about the fourth or fifth trip there was a most desperate struggle between the canoeman and the leak to see which would conquer before they reached the shore, the result being a partial victory for both, the canoe's head going under water just as it reached the shore, upon which there was a hurried scramble to unload it without damage.

This lake was called by the Indians Kluk-tas'-si; and, as it was one of the very few pronounceable names of Indian derivation in this section of the country, I retained it, although it is possible that this may be the Lake Labarge of some books, the fact that it is the first lake above the site of old Fort Selkirk being the only geographical datum in its favor, while all its other relations to equal points of importance are opposed to the theory. In fact, it had evidently been mapped by the merest guesswork from vague Indian reports.

I hope I shall be excused for again reviving the subject of conjectural geography, so uncertain in its results and so prevalent in Alaskan charts, especially those relating to the interior, even when they are of an official character. If the self-satisfaction of these parlor map-makers has been gratified in following unknown rivers and mountains wherever their fancy and imagination led them, and no other harm resulted, one conversant with the facts might dismiss the manifold errors that occur in their charts with a contemptuous smile at the method pursued. But that harm of the most serious nature can result from these geographical conjectures is evident from the following true story told me by the person interested. A party of miners had crossed the Chilkoot trail and were on a "prospecting tour" down the river and lakes. Discouraged at the outlook as to finding gold or silver in paying quantities, there was considerable diversity of opinion in regard to the propriety of any further advance in such a wild unexplored country, the majority advocating a return. Among their number was a young lawyer, a graduate of an eastern college, I believe, who had joined the party in the hope of finding adventures and of repairing his health, which had suffered from too close an application to his professional studies. Having in his possession an official government chart which pretended to map the route over which he had come as well as that ahead of him, although he had received proof of its untrustworthiness in the past, he resolved to trust it once more. Numerous Indian villages and towns were shown upon the chart at convenient intervals along the remainder of the route. He thought the villages might not be just where they were marked, but believed that in the main their number and positions were at least approximately correct. Basing his expectations on the help to be obtained from these numerous Indian villages, he announced to the party his determination to continue his travels, whatever might be the conclusion to which the others should come, pointing out the hospitality which they had received from the Indians they had previously met, and expressing his expectation of meeting many others as friendly. Whether his reasoning influenced them or not I have forgotten, and it matters but little, but at any rate the party gave up the idea of returning and continued on drifting down the river and prospecting wherever the conditions seemed favorable, until old Fort Selkirk was reached, when they ascended the Pelly, upon the bars of which stream the prospect of finding gold was greatest. During all this long journey not a single Indian was seen by the party, and only one deserted house, with an occasional peeled spruce pole at long intervals that marked the temporary camps of the few wandering natives. Young C—— took the jokes of his companions upon his chart and its Indian towns good-naturedly enough, and the map was nailed to a big spruce tree and used for a target for rifle practice, but he often spoke to me in a far different strain as he recounted the chances of his taking the journey alone aided solely by this worthless map. In fact there is not an official or government map of Alaska, that, taken as a whole, is worth the ink with which it is printed. Limited explorations and surveys in this vast territory, such as those of Captain Raymond on the Yukon, Lieutenant Ray on the Arctic Coast, Lieutenant Stoney on the Putnam river, and many others, are undoubtedly excellent, second to none in the world made under similar circumstances, and confined strictly to the country actually traversed by each, with broken line delineations in surrounding districts, indicating conjectures; but as soon as these or such portions of them as the Washington compiler may see fit to take, are dumped into a great map of Alaska, they are so mixed with conjectural topography and map work that one must know the history of Alaskan exploration about as well as the history of his own life to be able to discriminate between the good and the worthless.

Like Lake Marsh, Kluk-tas-si is full of mudbanks along its shores; its issuing waters being clear as a mountain stream, while its incoming tributaries are loaded with earthy deposits. So full of these is Kluk-tas-si, and so much more contracted is the waterway through them, that we thought we could detect a slight current when making our way along in the blue water. This was especially noticeable when the wind died down to a calm. In spite of all this, Kluk-tas-si offered fewer difficulties in the way of making landings than Lake Marsh. It seemed to me that but a brief geological period must elapse before these lakes are filled with deposits, their new shores covered with timber, and their beds contracted to the dimensions of the river. Such ancient lakes appear to occur in the course of the stream further on.

We started at seven in the morning and were occupied until eight in rowing and sailing through the tortuous channel which led to blue water in the deep portion of the lake. To keep this channel readily we sent the Indians ahead in the canoe, who sounded with their long paddles, and by signals indicated the deepest parts. In spite of their exertions we stuck a couple of times, and had to lower sail and jump overboard. The wind kept slowly increasing and by the time we set the full spread of our sail in bold water, we were forging along at such a rate that we put out a trolling spoon, but nothing was caught, the huge craft probably frightening every thing away. The wind died down and sprang up again several times during the day, but every time it arose it was in our favor. That evening by the time we reached Camp 21, on the eastern shore of the lake, we had scored about thirteen miles, a very good reckoning for lake travel any time.

The west bank of this lake is very picturesque about fourteen or fifteen miles from its southern entrance, large towers and bastion-like projections of red rock upheaving their huge flanks upon what seems to be a well-marked island, but which is in reality a part of the mainland, as our Indians assured us. According to the same authorities a river comes in here at this point, having shores of the same formation, and called by them the Red River. The frequency of this name in American geographical nomenclature was to me sufficient reason for abandoning it; and I gave the name of Richthofen to the rocks and river (the latter, however, not having been seen by us), after Freiherr von Richthofen of Leipsic, well known in geographical science. The next evening was a still and beautiful one, with the lake's surface like a mirror, and the reflection of the red rocks in the quiet water made the most striking scene on our trip; two warm pictures of rosy red in the sinking sun joined base to base by a thread of silver, at the edge of the other shore. The eastern shores of the lake seem to be formed of high rounded hills of light gray limestone, picturesquely striped with the foliage of the dark evergreen growing in the ravines. From the lake the contrast was very pretty, and showed a regularity that scarcely seemed the work of nature. I named them the Hancock Hills after General Hancock of the army. A number of salmon-trout were caught in this lake (the first one was caught in Lake Nares), the largest of which weighed over eight pounds, that being the limit of the pocket scales of the doctor. Saturday the 7th gave us the most conflicting winds, and although we were upon the waters of Kluk-tas-si, for twelve hours we made but nine miles, a head wind driving us into Camp 22.

We did not allow the 8th to tempt us on the lake so readily, and the day was employed in taking astronomical observations, arranging our photographic apparatus and similar work, until early afternoon. At 1.30 P.M. a favorable breeze from the south sprang up, and by 2 o'clock was raging in a gale, blowing over the tent where we were eating our midday meal, filling the coffee and eatables with sand and gravel, and causing a general scampering and chasing after the lighter articles of our equipment, which took flight in the furious wind. Most exasperating of all, it quickly determined us to break camp, and in less than half an hour we had all of our effects stored on the vessel, and were pulling off the beach, when just as our sail was spread the wind died down to a zephyr hardly sufficient to keep away the mosquitoes. At 7 o'clock the lake was as quiet as can be imagined, and after remaining almost motionless for another hour we pulled into the steep bank, made our beds on the slanting declivity at a place where it was impossible to pitch a tent, and went to sleep only to be awakened at night by showers of rain falling upon our upturned faces. We congratulated ourselves that we were in a place where the drainage was good.

In the shallow water near the shores of Lake Kluk-tas-si, especially where a little bar of pretty white sand put out into the banks of glacier mud, one could always find innumerable shoals of small graylings not over an inch in length, and our Indians immediately improvised a mosquito bar into a fish net, catching hundreds of the little fellows, which were used so successfully as bait with the larger fish of the lake that we finally thought the end justified the means.

OUTLET OF LAKE KLUKTASSI.

Terminal Butte of the Hancock Hills (on the right).

Instead of dying down as we spread sail early in the morning of the 9th, the wind actually freshened, upsetting all our prognostications, and sending us along at a rate that allowed us to enter the river early in the forenoon, and I doubt if the besiegers of a fortress ever saw its flag go down with more satisfaction than we saw the rude wall-tent sail come down forever, and left behind us the most tedious and uncertain method of navigation an explorer was ever called upon to attempt—a clumsy raft on a motionless lake, at the sport of variable winds. Our joy was somewhat dampened at sticking several times on the bars, one of which delayed us over half an hour.

In all these rivers just after emerging from the lakes the current was quite swift, and so shallow in many places as almost to deserve the name of rapids. This was particularly the case where the swift stream cut into the high banks that loomed some forty to sixty feet above us as we rushed by, a top stratum that rested upon the stiff yellow clay being full of rounded bowlders, which, when undermined, were letdown into the river's bed, choking it partially with most dangerous-looking obstacles.

During the whole day we were passing through burned districts of heavy timber that looked dismal enough, backed, as they were, by dense clouds of black smoke rising ahead of us, showing plainly that the devastation was still going on. Many of these sweepings of fire were quite old; so old, in fact, that the dark rotting trunks had become mere banks of brown stretched along the ground, the blackened bark of the stumps being the only testimony as to the manner of its destruction. Others, again, were so recent that the last rain had not yet beaten the white ashes from their blackened limbs, while late that evening we dashed through the region of smoke and flame we had discerned earlier in the day. It is wonderful what great wide strips of river these flames will cross, probably carried by the high winds, when light bunches of dry, resinous matter are in a blaze. We saw one instance which, however, must be a rare one, of a blazing tree that fell into the water, where it immediately found a hydrostatic equilibrium, so that its upper branches continued on fire, blazing and smoking away like a small steam launch. It might readily have crossed the river as it floated down, and becoming entangled in the dry driftwood of the opposite bank, have been the nucleus of a new conflagration, the limits of which would have been determined by the wind and the nature of the material in its path. Of course, in such an intricate wilderness of black and brown trunks and stumps, any kind of game that approaches to black in color, such as a moose or black or brown bear; in fact, any thing darker than a snow-white mountain-goat, can easily avoid the most eagle-eyed hunter, by simply keeping still, since it could scarcely be distinguished at any distance above a hundred yards.

The western banks at one stretch of the river consisted of high precipitous banks of clay, fringed with timber at the summit. In one of the many little gullies that cleft the top of the bank into a series of rolling crescents, a member of the party perceived and drew our attention to a brown stump which seemed to have an unusual resemblance to a "grizzly bear," to use his expression. The resemblance was marked by all to such an extent that the stump was closely watched, and when, as we were from four to six hundred yards away, the stump picked up its roots and began to walk down the slope, there was a general scrambling around for guns, giving the stump an intimation that all was not right, and with one good look from a couple of knots on its side, it disappeared among the rest of the timber before a shot at a reasonable distance could be fired. Thereafter our guns were kept in a more convenient position for such drift timber.

After we had made a good forty miles that day, we felt perfectly justified in going into camp and about seven o'clock we commenced looking for one. The river was uniformly wide, without a break that would give slack water where we could decrease our rapid pace, and that day commenced an experience such as I have treated of in the chapter on rafting. Not knowing the efficacy of this method at the time, we did not find a camp until 8:15, but back of us lay over forty-five miles of distance traversed, which amply compensated us for the slight annoyance. Ahead of us there still hung dense clouds of smoke which seemed as if the whole world was on fire in that direction. An hour or so after camping (No. 24) a couple of miners came into camp, ragged and hungry, the most woe-begone objects I ever saw. They belonged to a party that numbered nearly a dozen and who had started about a month ahead of us. These two had left a third at camp about a mile up the river (from which point they had seen us float by), and were returning to civilization in order to allow the rest of the party food sufficient to enable them to continue prospecting. The party, at starting, had intended to eke out their civilized provisions with large game from time to time, in order to carry them through the summer. They were well armed and had several practical hunters with them, who had often carried out this plan while prospecting in what seemed to be less favored localities for game. Their experience confirmed the Indian reports that the caribou and moose follow the snow-line as it retreats up the mountains in the short summer of this country, in order to avoid the mosquitoes, with the exception only of a few stragglers here and there, on which no reliance can be placed. It was certainly a most formidable undertaking for these ragged, almost barefooted men to walk back through such a country as I have already described, with but a mere pittance of food in their haversacks. Possessing no reliable maps, they were obliged to follow the tortuous river, for fear of losing it, since it was their only guide out of the country. Large tributaries coming in from the west, which was the side they had chosen, often forced them to go many weary miles into the interior before they could be crossed. They hoped to find an Indian canoe by the time the lakes were reached, but from the scarcity of these craft I doubt if their hopes were ever realized. I heard afterward that they had suffered considerably on this return trip, especially in crossing through the Perrier Pass, and had to be rescued in the Dayay Valley by Indians from the Haines Mission.

The country was constantly getting more open as we proceeded, and now looked like the rolling hill-land of old England. By the word open, however, I do not mean to imply the absence of timber, for the growth of spruce and pine on the hills and of the deciduous trees in the valleys continued as dense as ever, and so remained nearly to the mouth of the river, varying, however, in regard to size and species.

Upon the 10th, the current did not abate a jot of its swiftness, and although we started tolerably late, yet when Camp 25 was pitched, at 8:15 P.M., in a thick grove of little poplars (there being no prospect of a better camp in sight), we had scored 59 miles along the axis of the stream, the best record for one day made on the river. About 10 o'clock, that morning, we again passed through forest fires that were raging on both sides of the river, which averages at this point from 300 to 400 yards in width. A commendable scarcity of mosquitoes was noticed on this part of the river.

Shortly after noon we passed the mouth of a large river, from 150 to 200 yards in width, which my Chilkat Indians told me was called the Tah-heen'-a by them. The resemblance of this name to that of the Tahk-heen'-a made me abandon it, and I called it after M. Antoine D'Abbadie, Membre d'Institut, the French explorer. In regard to Indian names on this part of the Yukon River, I found that a white man labors under one difficulty not easy to overcome. The Chilkats, who are, as it were, the self-appointed masters over the docile and degraded "Sticks," while in the country of the latter, have one set of names and the "Sticks," or Tahk-heesh, have another. Oftentimes the name of a geographical object is the same in meaning, differing only according to the language. More often the names are radically different, and what is most perplexing of all, the Sticks will give the same name as the Chilkats in the presence of the latter, thus acknowledging in the most humble and abject way their savage suzerainty.

For some time before reaching the mouth of the D'Abbadie high hills had been rising on the eastern slope, until near this tributary their character had become truly mountainous. I called them the Semenow Mountains, after Von Semenow, President of the Imperial Geographical Society of Russia. They extend from the D'Abbadie River on the north to the Newberry River (after Professor Newberry, of New York), on the south. Between them and the Hancock Hills is located an isolated and conspicuous butte which I named after M. Charles Maunoir, of the Paris Geographical Society. A very similar hill between the Tahk River and the Yukon was named after Professor Ernst Haeckel, of Jena, Germany. The mouth of the D'Abbadie marks an important point on the Yukon River, as being the place at which gold begins to be found in placer deposits. From the D'Abbadie almost to the very mouth of the great Yukon, a panful of "dirt" taken with any discretion from almost any bar or bank, will when washed give several "colors," to use a miner's phrase. The Daly River comes in from the east some forty miles further on, measured along the stream, forming, with the Newberry and D'Abbadie, a singular trio of almost similar streams. The last-mentioned river I have named after Chief Justice Daly, of New York, a leading patron of my Franklin Search expedition. The frequent occurrence of large tributaries flowing from the east showed this to be the main drainage area of the Upper Yukon, a rule to which the sole exception of the NordenskiÖld River (after Baron von NordenskiÖld, the celebrated Swedish explorer of the Arctic), which comes in from the west, fifty miles beyond the Daly, and is the peer of any of the three just mentioned. Immediately after passing those rivers, the Newberry especially, the Yukon became very much darker in hue, showing, as I believe, that the tributaries drained a considerable amount of what might be called—possibly inappropriately—"tundra" land, i.e., where the water, saturated with the dyes extracted from dead leaves and mosses, is prevented by an impervious substratum of ice from clarifying itself by percolating through the soil, and is carried off by superficial drainage directly into the river-beds. Where we camped on the night of the 25th I noticed that many of the dead seasoned poplars with which we built our camp-fire and cooked our food had been killed in previous winters by the hares, that had peeled the bark in a circle around the trunk at such a uniform height of from twenty to twenty-four inches from the ground, measured from the lower edge of the girdle, that I could not but think that this was about the average depth of the winter snow, upon which the hares stood at the time. On the 11th we drifted over fifty miles. Shortly after starting we passed the mouth of the Daly, already referred to, while directly ahead was a noticeable hill named by the Chilkats Eagles' Nest, and by the Tahk-heesh Otter Tail, each in their own language. I easily saw my way out of the difficulty by changing its name to Parkman Peak, after Professor Francis Parkman, the well-known American historian.

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We passed the mouth of the NordenskiÖld River on the afternoon of the 11th, and the same day our Indians told us of a perilous rapid ahead which the Indians of the country sometimes shot in their small rafts; but they felt very anxious in regard to our bulky vessel of forty-two feet in length, as the stream made a double sharp bend with a huge rock in the center. We started late on the morning of the 12th, and at 10 o'clock stopped our raft on the eastern bank in order to go ahead and inspect the rapids which we were about to shoot. I found them to be a contraction of the river bed, into about one-third its usual width of from four to six hundred yards, and that the stream was also impeded by a number of massive trap rocks, thirty to forty feet high, lying directly in the channel and dividing it into three or four well marked channels, the second from the east, being the one ordinarily used by the Indians. We rejected this, however, on account of a sharp turn in it which could not be avoided. These rapids were very picturesque, as they rushed between the fantastically formed trap rocks and high towers, two of which were united by a slender natural bridge of stone, that spanned a whirlpool, making the whole look like an old ruined stone bridge with but one arch that had withstood the general demolition. We essayed the extreme right-hand (eastern) passage, although it was quite narrow and its boiling current was covered with waves running two and three feet high, but being the straightest was the best for our long craft. Thousands of gulls had made the top of these isolated towers their breeding places, for nothing but winged life could ever reach them, and here, safe from all intrusion, they reared their young. As we shot by on the raft they rose in clouds and almost drowned the noise of the roaring waters with their shrill cries. This extreme right-hand channel through which we shot, could, I believe, be ascended by a light-draft river steamer provided with a steam windlass, a sharp bend in the river bank just before it is entered giving a short and secure hold for a cable rope; and if I am not too sanguine in my conjectures, the cascades below the Grand CaÑon mark the head of navigation on the Yukon River, as already noted. I named this picturesque little rapid after Dr. Henry Rink, of Christiana, a well-known authority on Greenland. After the Yukon receives the many large tributaries mentioned, it spreads into quite a formidable magnitude; interspersed with many islands, all of which at their upper ends, are so loaded with great piles of driftwood, oftentimes fifteen to twenty feet high, as to make the vista in one of these archipelagoes quite different according as one looks up or down the river, the former resembling the picturesque Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence, while the latter reveals only a dreary stretch of felled timber, lying in unpicturesque groups, with the bright green of the island foliage making the dreariness more conspicuous.

From Lake Kluk-tas-si almost to old Fort Selkirk we observed along the steep banks of the river a most conspicuous white stripe some two or three inches in width. After our attention had been attracted to this phenomenon for two or three days, we proceeded to investigate it. It averaged about two or three feet below the surface, and seemed to separate the recent alluvial deposits from the older beds of clay and drift below, although occasionally it appeared to cut into both, especially the alluvium. Occasionally, although at very rare intervals, there were two stripes parallel to each other and separated by a few inches of black earth, while oftentimes the stripe was plain on one side of the river and wholly wanting on the other. A close inspection showed it to be volcanic ash, sufficiently consolidated to have the consistency of stiff earth, but nevertheless so friable that it could be reduced to powder by the thumb and fingers. It possibly represents the result of some exceptionally violent eruption in ancient times from one or more of the many volcanic cones, now probably extinct, with which the whole southern coast of Alaska is studded. The ashes were carried far and wide by the winds, and if the latter then, as now, blew almost persistently from the southward during the summer (and I understand the reverse is the case in the winter), we could reasonably fix the eruption at that time of the year.

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The Yukon River as it widens also becomes very tortuous in many places, and oftentimes a score of miles is traversed along the axis of the stream while the dividers on the map hardly show half a dozen between the same points. In the region about the mouth of the NordenskiÖld River a conspicuous bald butte could be seen directly in front of our raft no less than seven times, on as many different stretches of the river. I called it Tantalus Butte, and was glad enough to see it disappear from sight.

The day we shot the Rink Rapids, and only a few hours afterward, we also saw our first moose plowing through the willow brush on the eastern bank of the stream like a hurricane in his frantic endeavors to escape, an undertaking in which he was completely successful. When first seen by one of the party on the raft, his great broad palmated horns rolling through the top of the willow brake, with an occasional glimpse of his brownish black sides showing, he was mistaken for an Indian running down a path in the brake and swaying his arms in the air to attract our attention. My Winchester express rifle was near me, and as the ungainly animal came into full sight at a place where a little creek put into the stream, up the valley of which it started, I had a fair shot at about a hundred yards; took good aim, pulled the trigger—and the cap snapped,—and I saved my reputation as a marksman by the gun's missing fire. This moose and another about four hundred miles further down the river were the only two we saw in the Yukon Valley, although in the winter they are quite numerous in some districts, when the mosquitoes have ceased their onslaughts.

That same evening—the 12th, we encamped near the first Indian village we had met on the river, and even this was deserted. It is called by them Kit^l-ah-gon (meaning the place between high hills), and consists of one log house about eighteen by thirty feet, and a score of the brush houses usual in this country; that is, three main poles, one much longer than the rest, and serving as a ridge pole on which to pile evergreen brush to complete the house. This brush is sometimes replaced by the most thoroughly ventilated reindeer or moose skin, and in rare cases by an old piece of canvas. Such are the almost constant habitations of these abject creatures. When I first saw these rude brush houses, thrown together without regard to order or method, I thought they were scaffoldings or trellis work on which the Indians, who lived in the log house, used to dry the salmon caught by them during the summer, but my guide, Indianne, soon explained that theory away. In the spring Kit^l-ah-gon is deserted by its Indian inmates, who then ascend the river with loads so light that they may be carried on the back. By the time winter approaches they have worked so far away, accumulating the scanty stores of salmon, moose, black bear, and caribou, on which they are to subsist, that they build a light raft from the driftwood strewn along banks of the river, and float toward home, where they live in squalor throughout the winter. These rafts are almost their sole means of navigation from the Grand CaÑon to old Fort Selkirk, and the triangular brush houses almost their only abodes; and all this in a country teeming with wood fit for log-houses, and affording plenty of birch bark from which can be made the finest of canoes. Kit^l-ah-gon is in a beautiful large valley, as its Indian name would imply (I named it Von Wilczek Valley, after Graf von Wilczek of Vienna), and I was surprised to see it drained by so small a stream as the one, but ten or twenty feet wide, which empties itself at the valley's mouth. Its proximity to the Pelly, twenty miles further on, forbids its draining a great area, yet its valley is much the more conspicuous of the two. Photographs of this and adjacent scenes on the river were secured by Mr. Homan before departing, and a rough "prospect" in the high bank near the river showed "color" enough to encourage the hope of some enthusiastic miner in regard to finding something more attractive. Looking back up the Yukon a most prominent landmark is found in a bold bluff that will always be a conspicuous point on the river, and which is shown on page 193. I named this bluff after General Charles G. Loring, of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

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From Von Wilczek valley to old Fort Selkirk is but a little over twenty miles; and the river is so full of islands in many places that for long stretches we could hardly see both banks at a time, while it was nothing unusual to have both out of sight at points where the islands were most numerous. This cluster of islands (named after Colonel Ingersoll, of Washington), is, I think, situated in the bed of one of the ancient lakes of which I have spoken, although the opinion of a professional geologist would be needed to settle such a matter.

At 3 P.M. we reached the site of old Fort Selkirk. All our maps, some half a dozen in number, except one, had placed the site of Selkirk at the junction of the Pelly and Yukon between the two, the single exception noted placing it on the north bank of the Pelly where the streams unite. Noticing this discrepancy I asked Indianne for an explanation, and he told me that neither was correct, but that the chimneys of the old ruins would be found on the south side of the river about a mile below the junction, and I found him correct, the chimneys being visible fully a mile before we reached them. Here we were on land familiar to the footsteps of white men who had made maps and charts, that rough and rude though they were, were still entitled to respect, and accordingly at this point I considered that my explorations had ceased, although my surveys were continued to the mouth of the river; making the distinction that the first survey only is an exploration, a distinction which I believe is rapidly coming into vogue. Altogether on the Yukon River, this far, there had been taken thirty-four astronomical observations, four hundred and twenty-five with the prismatic compass, and two for variation of compass. I have no doubt that these are sufficiently accurate at least for all practical purposes of geographical exploration in this country, until more exact surveys are demanded by the opening of some industry or commerce, should that time ever come. The total length of this portion of the river just traversed from Haines Mission to Selkirk was five hundred and thirty-nine miles; the total length of the raft journey from its commencement at the camp on Lake Lindeman being four hundred and eighty-seven miles; while we had sailed and "tracked" and rowed across seven lakes for a distance aggregating one hundred and thirty-four miles.

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